In France, the guillotine has been abolished. Attorney General: “It’s the devil in the flesh!”

Born in Germany in 1908, Eugene Weidmann began stealing from a young age and even as an adult did not give up his criminal habits.

While serving a five-year sentence in prison for robbery, he met future partners in crime, Roger Millon and Jean Blanc. After their release, the three began working together, kidnapping and robbing tourists around Paris.

June 17, 1938. Eugene Weidman shows police the cave in the forest of Fontainebleau in France where he killed nurse Janine Keller.

They robbed and murdered a young New York dancer, a chauffeur, a nurse, a theater producer, an anti-Nazi activist, and a real estate agent.

Homeland Security officials eventually tracked down Weidman. One day, returning home, he found two police officers waiting for him at the door. Weidman shot at the officers with a pistol, wounding them, but they still managed to knock the criminal to the ground and neutralize him with a hammer lying at the entrance.

As a result of a sensational trial, Weidman and Millon were sentenced to death, and Blanc was sentenced to 20 months in prison. On June 16, 1939, French President Albert Lebrun rejected Weidmann's request for clemency and commuted Millon's death sentence to life imprisonment.

Weidman met the morning of June 17, 1939 in the square near the Saint-Pierre prison in Versailles, where the guillotine and the whistling of the crowd awaited him.

Among the spectators who wanted to watch the execution was the future famous British actor Christopher Lee, who was 17 years old at the time.

Weidman was placed in the guillotine and the chief executioner of France, Jules Henri Defourneau, immediately lowered the blade.

The crowd present at the execution was very unrestrained and noisy, many of the spectators broke through the cordon to soak handkerchiefs in Weidman's blood as souvenirs. The scene was so horrific that French President Albert Lebrun banned public executions entirely, arguing that instead of curbing crime, they served to awaken people's baser instincts.

The guillotine, originally invented as a quick and relatively humane method of killing, continued to be used in private executions until 1977, when Hamid Djandoubi was executed behind closed doors in Marseille. The death penalty in France was abolished in 1981.

Over its almost two-hundred-year history, the guillotine has decapitated tens of thousands of people, ranging from criminals and revolutionaries to aristocrats, kings and even queens. Maria Molchanova tells the story of the origin and use of this famous symbol of terror.

It was long believed that the guillotine was invented at the end of the 18th century, however, recent research has shown that such “decapitation machines” have a longer history. The most famous, and perhaps one of the first, was a machine called the Halifax Gibbet, which was a monolithic wooden structure with two 15-foot posts topped by a horizontal beam. The blade was an ax that slid up and down along slots in the uprights. Most likely, the creation of this “Halifax Gallows” dates back to 1066, although the first reliable mention of it dates back to the 1280s. Executions took place in the town's market square on Saturdays, and the machine remained in use until April 30, 1650.

Halifax Gallows

Another early mention of an execution machine is found in the painting Execution of Marcod Ballagh near Merton in Ireland 1307. As the title suggests, the victim's name is Marcoud Ballagh, and he was beheaded using equipment that bears a striking resemblance to a late French guillotine. A similar device is also found in a painting depicting a combination of a guillotine machine and traditional beheading. The victim was lying on a bench, with an ax secured by some kind of mechanism and raised above her neck. The difference lies in the executioner, who stands next to a large hammer, ready to strike the mechanism and send the blade down.

Hereditary executioner Anatole Deibler, “Monsieur de Paris,” inherited the post from his father and executed 395 people over a 40-year career.

Since the Middle Ages, execution by beheading was only possible for rich and influential people. It was believed that beheading was more generous, and certainly less painful, than other methods. Other types of execution, which involved the quick death of the convict, often caused prolonged agony if the executioner was insufficiently qualified. The guillotine ensured instant death even with minimal qualifications of the executioner. However, let us remember “Halifax Gibbet” - it was undoubtedly an exception to the rule, since it was used to carry out punishment for any people, regardless of their position in society, including the poor. The French guillotine was also applied to all segments of the population without exception, which emphasized the equality of citizens before the law.

18th century guillotine

At the beginning of the 18th century, many methods of execution were used in France, which were often painful, bloody and excruciating. Hanging, burning at the stake, and quartering were commonplace. Rich and powerful people were beheaded with an ax or sword, while the execution of the common populace often involved alternating between death and torture. These methods had a dual purpose: to punish the criminal and to prevent new crimes, so most executions were carried out in public. Gradually, indignation at such monstrous punishments grew among the people. These discontents were fueled primarily by Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire and Locke, who argued for more humane methods of execution. One of their supporters was Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin; however, it is still unclear whether the doctor was an advocate of capital punishment or ultimately sought its abolition.

Execution of French revolutionary Maximilian Robespierre

Guillotin, a doctor and member of the National Assembly, professor of anatomy, politician, member of the Constituent Assembly, friend of Robespierre and Marat, proposed using the guillotine in 1792. In fact, this beheading machine was named after him. The main part of the guillotine, intended for cutting off a head, is a heavy, several tens of kilograms, oblique knife (the slang name is “lamb”), which moves freely along vertical guides. The knife was raised to a height of 2-3 meters with a rope, where it was held in place by a latch. The head of the guillotined person was placed in a special recess at the base of the mechanism and secured on top with a wooden board with a recess for the neck, after which, using a lever mechanism, the latch holding the knife opened, and it fell at high speed onto the victim’s neck. Guillotin later oversaw the development of the first prototype, an impressive machine designed by the French doctor Antoine Louis and built by the German harpsichord inventor Tobias Schmidt. Subsequently, after using the machine for some time, Guillotin tried in every possible way to remove his name from this weapon during the guillotine hysteria in the 1790s, and at the beginning of the 19th century, his family unsuccessfully tried to petition the government to rename the death machine.

Portrait of Doctor Guillotin

In April 1792, after successful experiments on corpses, the first execution with the new machine was carried out in Paris, on Place de Greve - the first executed was a robber named Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier. After Pelletier's execution, the beheading machine was given the name "Luisette" or "Luizon", after its designer, Dr. Louis, but this name was soon forgotten. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the history of the guillotine is the extraordinary speed and scale of its adoption and use. Indeed, by 1795, only a year and a half after its first use, the guillotine had beheaded more than a thousand people in Paris alone. Of course, when mentioning these figures, one cannot ignore the role of time, since in France the machine was introduced only a few months before the bloodiest period of the French Revolution.

Execution of the French King Louis XVI

Eerie images of the guillotine began to appear in magazines and pamphlets, accompanied by highly ambiguous humorous comments. They wrote about her, composed songs and poems, and depicted her in caricatures and frightening drawings. The guillotine affected everything - fashion, literature and even children's toys; it became an integral part of French history. However, despite all the horror of that period, the guillotine did not become hated by the people. The nicknames given to her by the people were sad and romantic rather than hateful and terrifying - “national razor”, “widow”, “Madame Guillotin”. An important fact in this phenomenon is that the guillotine itself was never associated with any particular layer of society, and also that Robespierre himself was beheaded there. Both yesterday's king and an ordinary criminal or political rebel could be executed on the guillotine. This allowed the machine to become the arbiter of supreme justice.

Guillotine in Prague Pankrac prison

At the end of the 18th century, people came in whole groups to Revolution Square to watch the machine do its terrible work. Spectators could buy souvenirs, read the program listing the names of the victims, and even have a snack at a restaurant nearby called “Cabaret at the Guillotine.” Some went to executions every day, most notably the "Knitters" - a group of female fanatics who sat in the front rows directly in front of the scaffold and knitted between executions. This eerie theatrical atmosphere also extended to the convicts. Many offered sarcastic remarks or defiant last words before dying, some even dancing their last steps down the steps of the scaffold.

Execution of Marie Antoinette

Children often went to executions and some of them even played at home with their own miniature models of the guillotine. An exact copy of a guillotine, about half a meter high, was a popular toy in France at that time. Such toys were fully functional, and children used them to cut off the heads of dolls or even small rodents. However, they were eventually banned in some cities as having a bad influence on children. Small guillotines also found a place on the dinner tables of the upper classes, they were used for cutting bread and vegetables.

"Children's" guillotine

As the popularity of the guillotine grew, so did the reputation of executioners; during the Great French Revolution, they gained enormous fame. Executioners were assessed on their ability to quickly and accurately organize a large number of executions. Such work often became a family affair. Generations of the famous Sanson family served as government executioners from 1792 to 1847, bringing blades to the necks of thousands of victims, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the role of the main executioners went to the Deibler family, father and son. They held this position from 1879 to 1939. People often praised the names of the Sansons and Deiblers in the streets, and the way they dressed when going to the scaffold dictated the fashion in the country. The criminal world also admired the executioners. According to some reports, gangsters and other bandits even got tattoos with dark slogans like: “My head will go to Deibler.”

Last public execution by guillotine, 1939

The guillotine was used intensively during the French Revolution and remained the main method of executing capital punishment in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981. Public executions continued in France until 1939, when Eugene Weidmann became the last "open-air" victim. Thus, it took almost 150 years for Guillotin’s initial humane wishes to be realized in order to keep the execution process secret from prying eyes. The last time the guillotine was used was on September 10, 1977, when 28-year-old Tunisian Hamida Djandoubi was executed. He was a Tunisian immigrant convicted of torturing and murdering 21-year-old Elisabeth Bousquet, an acquaintance of his. The next execution was scheduled to take place in 1981, but the alleged victim, Philippe Maurice, was granted clemency.

France, Marseille

On September 10, 1977, Tunisian emigrant Hamid Djandoubi, convicted of murder, was executed in Marseille; he became the last criminal to be executed by guillotine.

The guillotine as a device for carrying out the death penalty has been documented since the 13th century, when it was used in Ireland, Scotland and England, especially during the Republic of Oliver Cromwell, as well as in Italy and Switzerland.

During the French Revolution, the guillotine was introduced by decree of the French National Assembly on March 20, 1792 as the only instrument for executing capital punishment, regardless of the social status of the person sentenced to death. The idea of ​​this law was submitted in 1790 by the doctor and revolutionary Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who himself was an opponent of the death penalty; he considered guillotining a more humane means of execution than hanging, beheading or shooting. Two years later, according to the design of the military surgeon Antoine Louis, a French version of a similar device was built, it was tested on corpses, and on April 25, 1792, the first person, the common thief Nicolas Pelletier, was executed on it in Paris on Place de Greve. The public, accustomed since the Middle Ages to “exquisite” torture, was disappointed by the speed of the execution.

Subsequently, the guillotine, as the device soon became known, was transported to the Place de la Revolution (now the Place de la Concorde), where more than 10,000 people were executed during the French Revolution, including the former King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. Figures of the French Revolution were also guillotined - Georges Danton, Robespierre, Louis Saint-Just, Desmoulins. Contrary to popular belief, Joseph Guillotin himself was not executed by guillotine, but died naturally.

In 1868, the guillotine was improved - it became dismountable and was transported to the place of execution, as a rule, to the square in front of the prison gates. Around the same time, the positions of regional executioners were abolished, and the main, Parisian executioner with assistants, if necessary, began to travel to various cities of the country.

In Germany, which introduced guillotining in 1803, executions by guillotine continued until 1949, and in the German Democratic Republic until 1960. Switzerland abandoned the use of the guillotine in 1940. The last public execution by guillotine in France was carried out in 1939, and the last execution by guillotine in general was on September 10, 1977. This was also the last death penalty in Western Europe.

In 1981, France abolished the death sentence as a form of punishment, automatically abandoning the guillotine as a means of executing a person.

The last public execution by guillotine took place on July 17, 1939. But for another 38 years, the “Widow” (as the French familiarly called this killing machine) conscientiously performed its functions of cutting off heads. True, the public was no longer allowed to attend such spectacles.

Hamid Djandoubi, a pimp of Tunisian origin, was guillotined in a Marseille prison in September 1977. The crimes he committed caused a strong reaction in society and resumed the interrupted discussion about the death penalty.

Four years later, François Mitterrand abolished the death penalty.

He hobbled to the place of execution on one leg. With the first light of morning, September 10, 1977, 31-year-old Hamid Dzhandoubi, pimp and murderer, was dragged to the scaffold. To bring him to his knees under the guillotine, the guards had to unfasten the prosthesis on which he had become accustomed to limping after a factory accident that resulted in his leg being amputated. In the courtyard of the Beaumette prison in Marseille, he asked for a cigarette. Having not finished smoking, Djandubi asked for another one: it was a Gitan cigarette, exactly the one he preferred. He smoked slowly, in complete silence. Later, his lawyers will say that after the second cigarette he wanted to take a few more puffs, but was refused: “Well, no! That’s enough, we’ve already been lenient with you,” muttered an important police official responsible for carrying out the execution. Well, what can you do? Djandubi put his head on the block. The blade fell at 4:40 am.

Who remembers Hamid Dzhandoubi today? However, he takes his place in the annals of French justice as the last person condemned to death whose sentence was carried out. Convicted of the rape, torture and premeditated murder of his 21-year-old mistress Elisabeth Bousquet, he became the third man to have his head cut off during Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's seven-year presidency. Before him, this fate befell Christian Ranuzzi (July 28, 1976) and Jerome Carrain (June 23, 1977). Djandoubi became the latest person the president refused to pardon, declaring: “Let justice be done.” Justice turned out to be surprisingly very swift: on February 25, 1977, the jury of the city of Bouches-du-Rhone considered his case for only two days and sentenced him to death. And five months later he was already guillotined.

Hamida Djandoubi arrived in Marseille 9 years before his execution, in 1968. At that time he was 22 years old. For the first time in his life, he traveled outside his homeland - Tunisia. Very quickly he got a job - he became a rigger and easily integrated into French society, which, after the May 1968 events, somehow immediately became more modern. In 1971, as a result of an accident, he not only lost his leg, but also broke down mentally: his friends said that the guy became a completely different person - cruel and aggressive. Djandubi, who had previously had a reputation as a seducer, became rude to women. Unexpectedly discovering his talent as a pimp, he succeeded in luring several girls into prostitution, whom Djandubi literally terrorized. Elizabeth Bousquet's refusal to give in to the demands of her lover, who sent her out into the street to catch clients, literally enraged him: he yelled at her, beat her... As soon as he left prison, where he was sent after Bousquet filed a complaint, he began to threaten her.

Attorney General: “It’s the devil in the flesh!”

Coming out of prison, on the night of July 3-4, 1974, Hamid Dzhandoubi kidnapped Elisabeth Bousquet at gunpoint. Having brought her to his home, he throws her on the floor and beats her severely with a stick, then with a belt. Then he rapes her, burns her breasts and genitals with a cigarette: Djandubi saw similar reprisals carried out by gang leaders in the criminal environment of Marseille. The agony of the unfortunate woman lasts for hours. The executioner decides to kill her. He pours gasoline on her and throws a burning match. Does not work. Being filled
Determined to end the victim's life, he literally drags her body to his beach house located in Lançon-de-Provence. There, in the presence of two minor girls who live with him and whom he forces into prostitution, Djandubi strangles his victim. There is horror in the girls' eyes. A few days after the discovery of the corpse, one of the child prostitutes turns him over to the police.
Djandubi is not on the run for long: after a few months he is arrested and imprisoned in Marseilles prison. In the hope of softening the hearts of the judges, he does not deny what he did and admits all the facts; he is even ready to participate in reproducing the circumstances of his crime. The police also arrest two minor accomplices and imprison them in the women's section of the Baumette prison. This becomes a real relief for them - they are so afraid of revenge! “As soon as I saw them,” one of the lawyers would later say, “I thought that I would meet absolutely depressed creatures. I thought that after reading the case describing the torture the victim suffered, they would be tormented by remorse. In fact, they looked completely different, they were relaxed, because prison, after the hell in which they had lived lately, seemed to them a real paradise! In November 1974, the lawyer managed to secure their release from custody, and in February 1977 they were completely acquitted.

All of France is closely following the trial of Djandoubi, and some newspapers are even comparing him to Adolf Hitler. As he faces the death penalty, various organizations have become active in advocating for the abolition of the death penalty, this “barbaric and useless method that disgraces the country.” Both of the defendant's lawyers, one of whom, Emile Pollack, is considered the best in Marseille, are making every effort to avoid a death sentence. They look into his past, look for extenuating circumstances, and tell the story of a boy who “was gentle, hardworking, obedient and honest,” but whose life was shattered after an accident. "It's the devil in the flesh!" - Prosecutor General Shovi answers them, who is not at all convinced by the arguments presented by the lawyers. However, they do not convince psychiatrists either: in their opinion, Hamid Dzhandoubi “represents a colossal danger to society,” although his intelligence is assessed as “above average.” This expertise is critical. The verdict of capital punishment, returned unanimously by the jury, was greeted with applause.

"French justice will no longer kill anyone"

On March 16, 1981, during the television program “Cards on the Table,” François Mitterrand, the Socialist presidential candidate, uttered the words “against the death penalty”: “I state this directly, without hiding my opinion,” he says, although all the polls public opinion show that the French are not ready to part with the guillotine. This is a turning point in the election campaign, but fate is on Mitterrand's side. On March 10, 1981, he was elected president. And on July 8, Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy announced the abolition of the death penalty. Parliament, assembled for an extraordinary session, votes on September 18 in support of this decision after the Minister of Justice Robert Badinter made his speech, which instantly became famous: “Tomorrow, thanks to you, these murders, shameful for all of us, will no longer be carried out early in the morning, under cover of secrecy, in French prisons. Tomorrow the bloody page of our justice will be turned.”

The page is also turned, stained with the blood of Elisabeth Bousquet, the victim of the mortal madness of Hamid Djandoubi, “a one-legged one who,” as Badinter will remind deputies, “no matter what terrible crimes he committed, showed all the signs of mental disorder, and who was dragged to the scaffold, stripped of his prosthesis". On February 19, 2007, during the presidency of Jacques Chirac, the abolition of the death penalty was enshrined in the Constitution. At Versailles, where Parliament met to vote on this change to the fundamental law, 26 out of 854 parliamentarians voted against it.

Jacques EXPERT, Elise KARLEN

Translation by Alexander PARKHOMENKO and Vladislav KRIVOSHEEV

In the photo: Dzhandubi's detention; Djandubi (sitting) with friends in Marseille; the house where the killer lived; during an investigative experiment; a letter from the prosecutor of the republic, which confirms the president’s refusal to pardon Dzhandoubi.

* The May events of 1968 were a social crisis in France, which resulted in demonstrations, riots and a general strike. The skirmishers were students. Led ultimately to a change of government, the resignation of President Charles de Gaulle and, in a broader sense, huge changes in French society.

The guillotine is a kind of pinnacle of executioner skill, which became one of the notorious symbols of the French Revolution. The mechanism that replaced man in the executioner's craft - was it simply a reflection of soulless terror or a way to show mercy? Let's look at Popular Mechanics together.

Guillotine (French guillotine) is a special mechanism for carrying out the death penalty by cutting off the head. Execution using a guillotine is called guillotining. It is noteworthy that this invention was used by the French right up to 1977! In the same year, for comparison, the manned spacecraft Soyuz-24 went into space.

The guillotine is designed simply, but it copes with its responsibilities very effectively. Its main part is the “lamb” - a heavy (up to 100 kg) oblique metal blade that moves freely vertically along the guide beams. It was held at a height of 2-3 meters using clamps. When the prisoner was placed on a bench with a special recess that did not allow the convict to withdraw his head, the clamps were opened using a lever, after which the blade decapitated the victim at high speed.

Story

Despite its fame, this invention was not invented by the French. The “great-grandmother” of the guillotine is considered to be the “Halifax Gibbet,” which was simply a wooden structure with two posts topped by a horizontal beam. The role of the blade was played by a heavy ax blade, which slid up and down along the grooves of the beam. Such structures were installed in city squares, and the first mention of them dates back to 1066.

The guillotine had many other ancestors. The Scottish Maiden (Maiden), the Italian Mandaya, they all relied on the same principle. Decapitation was considered one of the most humane executions, and in the hands of a skilled executioner, the victim died quickly and without suffering. However, it was precisely the laboriousness of the process (as well as the abundance of convicts, who added more work to the executioners) that ultimately led to the creation of a universal mechanism. What was hard work for a person (not only moral, but also physical), the machine did quickly and without errors.

Creation and popularity

At the beginning of the 18th century, there were a great variety of methods of executing people in France: the unfortunate were burned, crucified on hind legs, hanged, quartered, and so on. Execution by beheading (decapitation) was a kind of privilege, and only went to rich and influential people. Gradually, indignation at such cruelty grew among the people. Many followers of Enlightenment ideas sought to humanize the execution process as much as possible. One of them was Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed the introduction of the guillotine in one of the six articles he presented during the debate on the French penal code on October 10th, 1789. In addition, he proposed introducing a system of nationwide standardization of punishment and a system of protecting the criminal's family, which should not be harmed or discredited. On December 1, 1789, these proposals by Guillotin were accepted, but execution by machine was rejected. However, later, when the doctor himself had already abandoned his idea, other politicians warmly supported it, so that in 1791 the guillotine still took its place in the criminal system. Although Guillotin’s demand to hide the execution from prying eyes did not please those in power, and guillotining became popular entertainment - the convicts were executed in squares to the whistling and hooting of the crowd.

The first to be executed by guillotine was a robber named Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier. Among the people, she quickly received such nicknames as “national razor”, “widow” and “Madame Guillotin”. It is important to note that the guillotine was in no way associated with any specific layer of society and, in a certain sense, equalized everyone - it was not for nothing that Robespierre himself was executed there.

From the 1870s until the abolition of the death penalty, the improved Berger system guillotine was used in France. It is dismountable and installed directly on the ground, usually in front of the prison gates, and the scaffold was no longer used. The execution itself takes a matter of seconds; the headless body was instantly pushed by the executioner’s assistants into a prepared deep box with a lid. During the same period, the positions of regional executioners were abolished. The executioner, his assistants and the guillotine were now based in Paris and traveled to the places to carry out executions.

End of story

Public executions continued in France until 1939, when Eugene Weidmann became the last "open-air" victim. Thus, it took almost 150 years for Guillotin’s wishes to conceal the execution process from prying eyes to be realized. The last government use of the guillotine in France occurred on September 10, 1977, when Hamida Djandoubi was executed. The next execution was scheduled to take place in 1981, but the alleged victim, Philippe Maurice, was granted clemency. The death penalty was abolished in France that same year.

I would like to note that, contrary to rumors, Dr. Guillotin himself escaped his own invention and safely died of natural causes in 1814.